Radio Maria Ireland

Naoimh Barbieri welcomes Fr Marius O'Reilly back to the Breakfast Show to talk about the First Saturdays devotion asked for at Fatima, and the national conference coming to Knock on 28 November. Fr Marius tells of a boy Sister Lucia met while taking out the rubbish at her convent in Spain, and of a Japanese man who told a Catholic priest that war in the world was his fault. Naoimh, who grew up goi...

On the eve of All Saints, Matthias Conroy talks to Bishop Denis Nulty of Kildare and Leighlin about the saints who have walked with him through his life, from the namesake his family has passed down for generations to the Hill of Slane a few kilometres from where he grew up. The bishop explains why he chose the feast of St John Vianney for his own ordination, which saint came out on top when Irela...

Fr Adrian Crowley continues his series on the saints as teachers, asking what each one has to show us about ordinary life. He moves from St Ignatius, bedbound for six months after a cannonball broke his leg, to St Thérèse and her little way, and on to Matt Talbot, whose turning point came on the night his friends refused to stand him a drink. Along the way come a soldier's tearful encounter with S...

Matthias Conroy rejoins Church Wisdom to finish chapter three of Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas and open chapter four, paragraphs 127 to 134. The discussion turns on the document's claim that we become fully human only by becoming more than human, and on the suggestion that the trouble with transhumanist dreams may be that they don't go far enough. From St Augustine's two cities the conversati...

Mary and Fr Eamonn McCarthy turn to the Beatitudes for the feast of All Saints, beginning with a listener's caution about asking someone in great pain to "offer it up." Fr Eamonn takes on the most puzzling of the promises, happy those who mourn, and asks how people without faith get through bereavement at all. Mary brings in the great multitude of Revelation 7 and an image of the Church as a ship...

Fr Dan Rehill, priest director of Radio Maria USA and an exorcist, tells how a trip to Medjugorje in 1998 led to his first confession in twenty years, and to a confessor who said something he would only understand much later. His road to ordination took him from Lower Manhattan after 9/11 to a hermit community in Nebraska and four rejections, before a bishop met him at the airport and invited him...

Harry talks to Fr Marius O'Reilly from Cork about the First Saturdays devotion, which Our Lady of Fatima tied to nothing less than peace in the world. Fr Marius explains where it came from, what the five Saturdays involve, and which part of it most people find hardest. He also previews the third annual First Saturdays conference at Knock on Saturday 28 November, a full day of talks, testimony, the...

Fr Peter George Flynn follows up his look at the Twelve with a broader question: what do bishops, priests, parents and everyone else have in common with the apostles? With help from Canon Francis Ripley, he makes the case that faith is caught rather than taught, and explains why winning an argument may be the worst thing an apostle can do. He then introduces another band of twelve, the Irish monks...

Few figures in history have had more biographies written about them than St Francis, so Fr Peter George Flynn sets out to say which ones are worth reading. He starts with Thomas of Celano, who knew Francis personally and also wrote one of the most famous chants in the Church's repertoire, and moves on to St Bonaventure, whose official life came with an order that every other version be destroyed....

Aiden Bourne is back with Deacon Don Devaney after a week off sick, and the two continue their walk through the opening chapters of Genesis, with detours through Amos, Daniel and the Catechism on creation out of nothing. Aiden explains what was going on behind the scenes during Daniel's twenty-one-day fast, and why he thinks science without faith slides into superstition. Don, meanwhile, has two s...

The Church of Scotland's decision to make two nineteen-year-olds elders of a Glasgow parish gives Fr Peter George Flynn his starting point: what does the Catholic Church's Code of Canon Law say about age? He works through the thresholds for fasting, abstinence, confirmation, marriage and religious life, with help from Fr Willie Doyle and a few saints who entered remarkably young, before arriving a...

Carmela talks to Danielle and John Connors, the pair behind the weekly podcast Reclaim the Faith, about the very different roads that brought them to it. Danielle lost her mother at 11 and found God alone in her bedroom through prayer and poetry, and later through Sr Clare Crockett, whom she was introduced to by an uncle who burst in one Christmas with news he couldn't keep. John grew up among 52...

Mary Stenson presents All Things Legion with the story that Archbishop Fulton Sheen gave when asked who had inspired him most, and why his answer was an eleven-year-old girl in China. There is archive audio of the Columban missionary Fr Aedan McGrath, imprisoned under Communist rule, on what he calls the primary work of the Legion, along with a talk by Canon Francis Ripley on priests, young people...

Nick Koeppel, back in Kraków, looks back on the latest Theology of the Body Educators conference and pilgrimage, held in Fatima. He explains why the shrine is so bound up with the life of St John Paul II, starting with an object set into the crown of Our Lady of Fatima, and walks through a weekend of talks, adoration and the candlelight procession. Participants from Portugal, England and Angola th...

Why does an all-powerful and loving God permit a universe governed by natural laws, chance and uncertainty? We explore how suffering, disease and even the death of a child can occur without being directly intended by God. Drawing on St Thomas Aquinas, we distinguish between God’s providence and the natural processes through which creation unfolds. We consider how […] L'articolo Science, Religion,...

Fr Eamonn McCarthy is back from New York with news for Donal O'Sullivan Latchford of Sunday evening Masses full of young professionals, and of a mural in St Patrick's Cathedral with an Irish connection. With Halloween approaching, the two turn to the light-hearted way some mainstream programmes have been treating witchcraft and spiritualism, and why Fr Eamonn sees it as anything but harmless. Also...

On the feast of Saints Simon and Jude, Fr Peter George Flynn takes on two apostles who can look like bit players in the Gospels. He follows a strange letter preserved by Eusebius to the city of Edessa and an image of Christ's face that may have a famous afterlife, then asks what the word "apostle" meant to those who first heard it, and what powers came with it. Feedback and questions: info@radioma...

Fr Billy Swan presents the Breakfast Show live from Ballyvaloo in Co. Wexford, where he is home from Rome on retreat, and returns to last Sunday's gospel on the greatest commandment and why neither half of it survives long without the other. He also takes a listener's question about what Christians owe the Jewish people. The second half looks ahead to the feast of St Charles Borromeo, the papal ne...

Caroline Bussher is joined by Kiran Lawler and, for the first time, Connor Marin to discuss The Rosary: Your Weapon for Spiritual Warfare by Johnnette S. Benkovic and Thomas K. Sullivan, which runs from the Battle of Lepanto to a plan for starting a Rosary crusade at home or in a parish. Connor, who has been praying the Rosary for about three years and can't imagine life without it, explains what...

Eoin Brennan and Fr Peter reach chapters 12 and 13 of Lorenzo Scupoli's The Spiritual Combat, which places the whole of the spiritual struggle in the conflict between the reasonable will and the will of the senses. They begin with St Teresa of Ávila's own account of her vision of hell, which Fr Peter first heard as a frightened child at a parish mission. Then Eoin asks the question that has frustr...

Margaret broadcasts from Dripsey in Co. Cork on a bright autumn afternoon, and turns to planning winter containers while the summer bedding is still going strong. She goes through the evergreen ferns, ivies and berrying shrubs worth collecting now while the garden centres are well stocked, why plants should spill over the edge of a pot rather than stand to attention in it, and the all-white contai...

Deacon Don Devaney and Marie, with Bridget praying in the background, are both just back from Medjugorje, and Don describes a morning rosary there when something happened in the room that the whole group only understood afterwards. They talk about why praying for one family can mean praying for many, and Don tells how he woke yesterday to four urgent problems and one very short prayer. Marie recal...

Fr Maurice Colgan is joined by Rowan Healy and Raphael for the fourth part of the DOCAT and the principles of the Church's social teaching. A vegan advertisement on the side of a Dublin bus sets the question for the episode, though it takes a while to get back to it, by way of Christmas turkey sandwiches, burritos in Drogheda and the differences between Italian, Australian and Irish culture. Once...

Paul McAree leads the Eucharistic Divine Mercy Holy Hour, praying for Northern Ireland at a time when old questions many thought were settled 30 years ago are being raised again. Before the prayer begins he recalls travelling North America at 19, when Belfast was a byword for division between Christians, and asks why God looked down on the North and gave it the measure of peace it has, an answer h...

Caroline retells the parable of the Good Samaritan, beginning not with the traveller but with a frightened boy hiding among the rocks above the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, waiting with the men of his family for someone to come round the bend. The priest and the Levite pass by as they do in the Gospel, but this version asks the man left on the road a question, and his answer changes the ending....